Home Entertainment Director Tony Gilroy talks Bourne Legacy story and shaky cam. Also, first look at Edward Norton's villain.

Director Tony Gilroy talks Bourne Legacy story and shaky cam. Also, first look at Edward Norton's villain.

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Bourne Legacy may not have a Hulk (well kind of, if you forget that Edward Norton donned the torn purple pants before), and it may not have a Space Jockey and giant creepy head statue thing, but that does not make it any less anticipated than it’s superhero and science fiction blockbuster rivals.

Especially now that Oscar nominated Tony Gilroy, who provided scripting duties for the Matt Damon trilogy is also now in director’s chair for this sequel/spinoff. Gilroy had a chat with MTV about how the film ties into the original movies, as well as whether or not we need to pack the motion sickness pills this time.

Contrary to what some may believe or dread, this is not just the next entry in the list of reboots that Hollywood seems to be making it’s way through, but rather an organic continuation of the story, just sans Jason Bourne himself, as Gilroy explains:

“Everything that happened before was not a dream. Everything that happened was completely real, but you thought you knew what was going on. You thought you were seeing the world, and this movie is telling you that there’s a much larger world, a much larger conspiracy beyond this. The events of the other three films are incredibly present, but they’re not really in this very much. What happens in Ultimatum is really the spark that’s blowing open the door to this movie because the Jason Bourne story is exploding out into the public. Being impossible to conceal any further is causing problems for this much larger conspiracy. Ultimatum plays in the background of the very beginning of this film.”

While the original Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass directed films certainly didn’t create shaky cam, they popularized the technique to the point that almost everybody began replicating it for their own action sequences, cinema-goers puking in the aisles be damned. So for this one do we need to pop some Dramamine and make sure we use plastic coveralls for our shoes, so that the we don’t step in something unwanted? Well, no actually:

“Everybody in the world ripped us off. It’s been done to death at this point. It’s on TV three nights a week, much less Bond and everything else. The worst thing that could have been done would be to just slavishly follow some cookie-cutter pattern of visual style and storytelling style.”

He also elaborated on the difference in tone that this film has to the first trilogy:

“It’s a bigger movie in the terms of the journey of it and the scale of it and the amount of stories in it and where it’s going. The great thing about Jason Bourne was that he was claustrophobically stuck down and trying to figure out this moral question. The whole second film is about an apology. It’s really about this guy trying to morally come to grips with the conflict between who he thinks he is and what he’s done. This character in this film has no moral conflict whatsoever. Jeremy Renner’s character has the reverse of amnesia. He knows exactly where he’s come from. He knows exactly what the stakes are if he doesn’t achieve his journey. It’s a very different tone, yet it will be very rewarding to people. You should be able to see the movie and not see any of them before. It’s been kind of ironic. The people that were having the most trouble getting their heads around the fact that we were doing this are actually the people who I think will ultimately be the most happy about what we’re doing. It has a lot of payback for the true fans.”

Along with all those great snippets of information, we also get our first real glimpse of Edward Norton’s villain, Byer. We still don’t know much about the character but we do know that he loves a good stare down:

Here’s the synopsis:

The narrative architect behind the “Bourne” film series, Tony Gilroy, takes the helm in the next chapter of the hugely popular espionage franchise that has earned almost $1 billion at the global box office: “The Bourne Legacy.” The writer/director expands the “Bourne” universe created by Robert Ludlum with an original story that introduces us to a new hero (Jeremy Renner) whose life-or-death stakes have been triggered by the events of the first three films. 

For “The Bourne Legacy,” Renner joins fellow series newcomers Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach and Oscar Isaac, while franchise veterans Albert Finney, Joan Allen, David Strathairn and Scott Glenn reprise their roles. 

Last Updated: April 18, 2012

One Comment

  1. Justin Hess

    April 18, 2012 at 08:49

    That is one holy hell of a cast. Jeeeeeeeez

    On another note, hopefully this and the Avengers do so well that Hollywood notes the value of a good script and the writer/ director. You can see the way Gilroy talks there that he understand the value of character and how the story needs to organically flow out of the world of the story, not have umpteen set-pieces just clumsily tacked on. 

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